


when atlas acts a man and makes his arms shake

by indoordisco



Category: The 100 (TV), The 100 Series - Kass Morgan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fae, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Bellamy Blake is a History & Mythology Nerd, Character Study, F/M, Fae Magic, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Immortality, Irish Mythology - Freeform, Kinda, Minor Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin, POV Bellamy Blake, Time Travel, Welsh mythology - Freeform, this is a whole load of mythology bullshit and like.. no plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-08-13 03:15:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20167231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indoordisco/pseuds/indoordisco
Summary: Exhaustion stalks him across the centuries.or: Godliness runs deep in Blake blood.





	when atlas acts a man and makes his arms shake

**Author's Note:**

> I geeked out a bit and spent a couple weeks researching all sorts of forms of fae in various mythology, a little research on greek and roman gods and a looooot of time clicking through hundreds of websites looking at the various names of the Fairy Queen (or the queen of Elphame/Elfhame/Elfland/the Seelie Court or Nicnevin or Queen Mab/Maeve/Morgan etc. you get the idea) 
> 
> This is all the mythology/history knowledge I have shoved into one fic so some of it might require googling. I think Bellamy would be proud.
> 
> EDIT: 21st Nov 2019, added an extra 300ish words towards the end because I had written them down physically and only just now found them.

There have been humans for as long as he can remember. He has been around a long time. Some days he is 20 and a half years old and some days he can remember the rise and fall of the Ancient Greeks and their gods and titans. Sometimes he can remember holding the weight of the world on his shoulders. He does not make a habit of telling people this, but sometimes he slips up and they laugh and ask if he is a time traveller. He has to stop himself from telling them that he is immortal, and he is travelling in time in the same way everyone else is. His journey is just a lot longer. 

Some days he is a kid who lives with his kid sister and his lonely (always, he has never seen her be anything but alone) mom. Her sadness lies heavy on the house, like mucky water leaking from the ceiling. Some days he up and leaves because it is too much. His sister has been 16 and three quarters for five hundred years. Some days his sister is an almost adult and some days she is Gaia, Titan of the earth. Sometimes she is 16 and three quarters.

He lives in Greece. This is a fact. He has been here for 15 years and it is almost time for them to move. Their house (an apartment block that stands on the foundations of one their old houses, which stands on the foundations of the house they lived in when his shoulders still smarted from the weight of the world) is two miles from the centre of Athens, a 24 minute walk to the Parthenon. He remembers it being built. He remembers the Athena Parthenos, sometimes. She was beautiful, he remembers that.

They are not poor. He has been alive for thousands of years and gold from 752 BC is worth a pretty penny. But he does not like wealth so much anymore. That sounds foolish, but he stopped revelling in gold and wine cellars when he was only 248. He tries though, tries not to be extravagant; mostly to avoid drawing attention but partly because his sixth lover told him wealth was unbecoming on him. Besides, he cannot sell all their old gold at once, and he has a lot to get through. Sometimes he wonders if it would be easier to go to the hunt for a little, let the value rise. He thinks he might miss humanity too much, though. And his sister would not like to be without him, no matter what she says. 

He picks up accents over thousands of years, heavy awkward ones and soft lilting ones and ones that sound so natural it is as if this is the only language he has ever spoken. He tells people he can speak three languages but he can speak 42 and none of them sound quite right.

His Greek is odd. Heavy. Some days he tells a neighbour about the drive he went on last week and she looks at him blankly. He repeats himself carefully and says _ hunt _ instead of _ drive _ again. He does not mean to. His accent is that of someone unused to the language, although he has spoken it for centuries. It is less the fact that he learned modern Greek when he was nearly a thousand years old and more his unwillingness to separate from the fae. Sometimes he speaks and it is Gaelic or old French or Welsh so archaic even the fae that have been in Welsh caves since the dawn of time do not know what he is saying. He forgets that they are not in court and that people here speak English and Greek. It is less a foreign accent and more like one that has been diluted by the other 41 languages he speaks. 

The hunt has no location, and it is not really a place anyway, but it has anchors to the world. There is a coastline off Devon that gets him to the hunt if he dives off, and a willow tree in Maine that sucks you under its roots if you get too close. Most dead end alleys and lakes in Greece are anchors for the hunt because this is where it began, when thirst for _hunt blood run_ first started calling in the fae’s blood. 

He tries to live near the anchors, if he can. It makes it easier. The longing for the chase is quieter in his blood. He goes across to India on one of the first trading ships with his sister, dressed in the clothes of English royalty and they spend a month hitchhiking to the opposite coast to a hamlet with stories of copper tongued fairies hiding in the wishing wells. A hand plunged into the lukewarm depths yields no fairies, but they hold their breaths and they jump. They did not need to come here— there are other portals far nearer, but his sister is young (some days) and not easily entertained, and fairy tales and voyages are the easiest way to keep her happy.

He does not visit the Seelie Court often; the last time he did, he was scarcely two thousand years old and running from the Vikings who believed he was Odin until his sons were older than him and still growing and until he was 20 and a half for 30 years. They do not understand that he was never a god. He is fae, sure, but he is no god. He cannot control thunder and he could not even touch the iron crown that hung heavy from the corner of his throne without gloves. His wife, a girl a little older than his sister, (which still makes him shudder when he thinks about it too long), died after Thor was born, and he cried for a week because he may be near immortal and near immovable but he loved her. He stayed for as long as he could, after that, raising their son and keeping her- not alive, exactly, but _ there _. They chased him out when Thor was 34 and halfling (not the god of thunder, instead, no, he had a half golden eye and a penchant for magic), and he was 20 and a half and fae.

It makes sense that he would meet Athena herself, one day. She ruled over them for thousands of years, when he was Atlas and his shoulders still bruised from the weight of the world. He is more surprised how long it takes, but she comes into his life like a new moon, with the sense that she has always been there and always will. He smiles.

She says, quiet, “Hello, Atlas.”

“I haven’t gone by that name in thousands of years, Athena.”

She laughs, delicate. “And I haven’t gone by that one in millennia.”

His sister, an immovable force by his elbow holds out her hand.

Athena smiles and takes her hand. “I guess I could call you grandmother.”

Gaia, 16 and three quarters years old, laughs until there are tears in her eyes. He smiles and smiles because he hasn’t seen his sister laugh in a hundred years and he had almost forgotten how happy it sounds.

Athena smiles, wide and blinding, and truly looks like a goddess for a split second. She salutes him teasingly and wraps an arm briefly around his sister, and then she is gone. He does not see her again for years. 

The train station is a very new thing. He used to wade knee high into silvery ponds and dive off white chalk cliffs, but now, instead, he feels the sunlight ripple across his shoulders from the windows high above, and he holds his breath. He pushes through the ticket barrier and thinks of home. He tumbles through and nearly trips over a drunk human sprawled on the floor of the court. It does not get easier.

He stands and rolls his shoulders back and he has a crown and his eyes are brown and gold, breathes deep and he is king. Time does not work properly in the court, and here it could be 300 B.C. or so far into the future that they use yet another date system. The crown is heavier than it was last time, but it burns a little less. The joints between the iron branches (iron so strong he has scars on the tops of his ears) are thick with rust, and the garnet is melded to it. He tilts his chin up and his name is Odin. Some days he holds the world on his shoulders and some days it lies sleeping beneath his feet and some days he rules over it all. The descent into the court is hard but getting out is harder. He disappears for years, sometimes.

The crown is from 1382, when he had been Owain Glyndŵr for four years. He tells tales of his birth, of the storms when he came into the world to distract from the fact that Owain does not exist and he has only been here for four years of Owain’s 23 year life.

The crown is nowhere near as old as him, because he is nearly 2000 years old when people start to call him Owain, when rage bubbles heady under his tongue, when he fights to keep Wales free. People don’t see him enough to realise he is 20 and a half and that his wife is the only one in their house that is ageing. He leaves for Italy in 1412, when it is too obvious he has been 20 and a half for 43 years and everyone is too angry. He lives twenty minutes from the Colosseum and his sister joins him five years later.

“Our mother is dead,” is the first thing she says to him, and then, “And in Wales, they have almost forgotten you.”

He hugs her as hard as he can, and then says, “We cannot stay here. Unrest is heavy in the south, and the Schism has only just ended.”

She smiles weakly. “Where to?”  
  


And then she is there, again. This is not a love story but she is there and it is like she has thrown her cloak off. It has been years and he had almost, almost forgotten her. This is not a love story (he swears). She catches his eye and his name is Odin and he is king. Her teeth are arrowheads and not quite white and her ears point sharp through her hair. Stepping around the dazed or drunk humans lying around the courtroom floor, she makes her way over to him.

“People here know me as Mab,” she says as if they never stopped talking the last time.

“Odin.” He smirks a little as the realisation dawns on her face.

Mab, queen of the Seelie Court, draws herself together, plasters on a grin, and says, “You are a man of many talents: bodybuilder, human and king of the Hunt.”

He snorts. “I wouldn’t call holding the world on your shoulders bodybuilding.”

She laughs, delicate like the queen of the fae, and drags her eyes up and down his body.

“When I was born, the Gwyll were babies in the nooks and crannies of caves and my parents were still alive and spoke Latin, and you look like a child, princess,” spills out of his mouth unpermitted.

Mab smiles, wide and feral. “I am a queen and you are underestimating me. I know when you were born, Owain, and I was born a mere hundred years after you.”

“I don’t go by that name anymore, Morgana.”

Morgana LeFay laughs and pushes wild blonde hair behind her ear, adorned with 3 tiny loops which seem to settle in her curls. “Glyndŵr, then.”

“The humans call me Bellamy.”

“Like the pirate?"

He snorts. “I was drunk when the mutineers asked for my name.”

Something deep, deep inside him shakes with all the elegance of a prisoner rattling at bars when Ankou draws a knife.

There is a tale, near as old as him, that the fae— if that is even what he is, it has been so long he is not sure anymore— are afraid of knives. He did not think it true, but he does not think he has faced many knives; it has always been swords, or lately, guns, and those are not knives.

He has not known Ankou long; he does not have a habit of making company with Death. He has been dying for hundreds of years now, slow. Slow like the crawl of a hornet across the back of a goose-bumped and shaking hand. He has accepted it, mostly, but befriending Death still feels a little like tempting fate.

He does not think Ankou means to scare him so- the knife is not aimed at him, and besides, he is there to rejoin the Hunt. Death, imploring the King of the Hunt for forgiveness. But the boy who stands there- for a boy is all he is- with a knife pointed at him does not move. He grins and slides his tongue across his fanged teeth.

Ankou spits, “First son, first to die,” at the boy.

He can taste the copper of blood and the tang of a storm in the air, and he breathes in deep and plasters a smirk on his face. “Now, now, children. Let’s have a fair fight.” He slides a dagger from his belt and hands it to the boy. 

He has loved a lot of people. Women, and men too, from time to time. Loved them with a passion that burned less bright each time. Not many of them knew about him, or even of the fae. There were periods in history where they were very wary of the supernatural, and he could not take a lover for decades. It is impossible to tell how someone will feel about the fae, until he's fucking them and his fangs slide out, unbidden. He risks it once or twice, because even immortal beings need to be held sometimes. Many of them scream and call for their guards or their family. Others still revel in it, in the power they have achieved from making an almost God weak. They smirk and rake their fingernails down his back, sharp with iron tips that many of them carry, and he winces as the blood begins to trickle but fucks them harder.

There are times, of course, when it is more than just a quick fuck. There are times where he loves so desperately, so violently, that it is 1303 and he goes as Romeo. The humans think he is 16, and the family he is with are convinced they are his, although occasionally there is a sneaking suspicion that he’s a changeling. Which, in all fairness, he technically is. Their last name is Montague, which he can only say with a smirk and blood slick fangs. He is not quite like the stories. He loves Juliet desperately from the minute he lays eyes on her, and he wants to scream, “I am not a Montague and there is no need for this feud,” every time someone sees them but he doesn’t because it would not help. He loves her still.

They marry and she tries to escape this world. He sees her laying there and he tries to kill himself but it doesn’t work because he knows deep down he cannot die, not yet. That death has to be the one to kill him, and that he cannot do it himself. He hurts himself, he knows, enough that she thinks he is dead. He feels her collapse on his chest, and the feel of the slow creep of blood across his stomach sticks with him for a thousand years.

He doesn’t mean to make it a pattern of appearing in Shakespeare's plays, but it happens, somehow. People now believe it is just a legend, but he went to watch Macbeth once, and the heady rush of power that runs through him when he sees Macbeth— a poor imitation of his younger self, he has to say— have a crown placed on his head nearly knocks him out. The beheading in the play is not realistic enough that he can feel the dull, cold steel on the back of his neck, but he still flinches. 

When he says he is immortal, that’s probably an oversimplification. He can die, it’s just that it never really kills him. Macbeth was something that took him a long time to come back from, and according to legend (although not Shakespeare) his head cried “Glahms hath murdered sleep! Macbeth shall sleep no more!” for two years before he woke. No one saw the waking part, of course. 

It is not long after he sees the play that James I courts him. There are whispers in the streets, of course, but they are nothing compared to the sense of control he gets from having a king half in love with him. The sheer thrill of having the phrase ‘I am the one who slaughtered the ancestor you are so proud of’ run through his very bones is what makes him stay, though. Those few hundred years are dark, and the urge to kill runs thick through his veins. History says that the Puritans beheaded Charles I, but it’s the last thing he does before moving to Spain to fight in the Franco-Spanish war. 

But in the end, he’s just tired. Tired of watching everyone die and everything turn to dust. There are others like him, of course. There is his sister. There is the court. But even the train station and its slanted sunbeams become familiar. Eventually, even the feeling of his stomach dropping as he pushes through the ticket barrier becomes familiar. He gets older— or, at least, time passes. He does not change. The train station becomes more and more modern until the ticket barriers stop working as a portal because too many mortals have ignored them, and he has to return to the ponds and the cliffs.

It has been a long time since he used the silvery watered lakes to get to the court. It is a remnant of stories past, but it works still. He steps into the water, up to calf height, until the hems of his rolled up jeans are wet. He holds his breath and dives forward and thinks of home. He collapses on the stone floor of the court, coughing. When he tilts his chin up he does not expect— barely remembers— the burn of the iron crown on his ears. It cannot have un-rusted itself, but it hurts more than it has in a long time. Time does not work properly in the court, and the lakes are old. It is entirely possible no time has passed since he was last here or maybe he is here before when he was last here. He does not know if or when he will leave the court, but for now, he rolls his shoulders back and he is King and she is there. She smiles and reaches for him, as if they are long lost friends, and he slumps into the throne next to her. He allows his fangs to slide out until they bite against the skin of his lip and then he grins, feral.

_ He does not think to leave for years. _

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! please leave a kudos and a comment if you enjoyed it because they really encourage me to keep writing!


End file.
